Now when we talk about the "Four Masters of the Early Tang Dynasty", we will sincerely worship them, they are the predecessors of great poets such as Li Bai and Du Fu, who liberated Tang poetry from the wilted and flashy court dramas, expanded them to the world of the Yangyang Grand View, and knocked on the door of the new era in one fell swoop. Without them, perhaps Tang poetry would not have become the pinnacle of poetic art. However, the life of the "Four Masters of the Early Tang Dynasty" at that time was not satisfactory.
Wang Bo had an uncertain temperament, once killed officials and slaves, and drowned at the age of 27; Luo Bin Wang was depressed and unmotivated, and after Xu Jingye's anti-military uprising, he either died in the rebellion or died in the end of the world; Yang Jiong, although he became a county commander, was criticized for his cruelty, and eventually only lived forty years. Of course, the most tragic thing is still Lu Zhaolin.
Lu Zhaolin was already famous in the world when he was young, and when he was young, he was hired by Li Yuanyu, the King of Deng, as a pawn. In the previous Southern Dynasty, the pawn was a very powerful official position, although nominally an aide to the king of the clan, but in fact the chin of the imperial court, and could even restrain the behavior of the king of the clan. However, in the Tang Dynasty, the pawn was only a clerical position, reduced to a real staff member. But this also gave Lu Zhaolin great convenience, allowing him to study various literary and historical classics. Li Yuanyu admired Lu Zhaolin very much, and praised everyone:
This is the same as me.
More than ten years later, Lu Zhaolin wrote the famous five-character ancient poem "Chang'an Guyi", which is an immortal famous piece with gorgeous language. However, it was this poem that changed Lu Zhaolin's life, causing him to fall from the clouds of great attention to the bottomless abyss, laying the groundwork for the tragic fate of his life.
The bane is one of the sentences "The Liang family painting cabinet rises in the sky, and the Han Emperor's golden stem is straight out of the clouds", which originally only said that the high pavilion of the carved Liang painting building of the magnate was towering, and the bronze pillar of the Jianzhang Palace shot straight into the clouds, which is a nostalgic word. However, this sentence is considered to be satirizing Liang Wang Wu's three thoughts. The "Liang family" in the poem should refer to the Liang king of the Han Dynasty, but it stimulates the sensitive and fragile nerves of the martial family.
As a result, Lu Zhaolin went to prison, was tortured, and was imprisoned for several years. By the time his relatives and friends rescued him, he was already described as withered and dying. More seriously, Lu Zhaolin suffered from wind disease in prison. What exactly this disease is, there is still controversy, because Tang Gaozong and Ge Shuhan were half-dead, and the historical data attributed it to wind disease; but from Lu Zhaolin's self-description in the "Five Sorrows Text", it is like leprosy:
The skeleton is half dead, the flesh is extinct, the four branches are withered, and the facial features are missing. The skin is thick and wrinkled, and the clothes are full of hair and knots. Hairy and bald, no uncle's eyebrows; cold lips and teeth, with Zhang Yi's shy tongue. Look up and look at it, and look at it; lean down and move, and bend and want to fold. If God exists and dies, his heart will not be born but not destroyed.
After all, it was Caizi, in order to save himself, Lu Zhaolin came up with several methods in succession. However, this first method had completely destroyed him, and sun Simiao, the divine doctor, was helpless, that is, alchemy. In China's long-standing Taoist culture, alchemy is one of its cores. The rulers of the Tang Dynasty generally believed in Taoism, which also made folk worship popular.
Many emperors in Chinese history have died because of the Dan medicine, wasting in vain the throne that they did not know how many lifetimes of blessings they had cultivated. As a student, Lu Zhaolin's understanding and professionalism of Dan Yao is even more limited. After he took the elixir, his body not only did not improve, but also deteriorated. It only allowed him to support it for more than ten years, until forty that he really couldn't hold on.
In fact, an important reason why Lu Zhaolin was able to last so long was to worship Sun Simiao as his teacher and ask him to recuperate. Sun Simiao once used the Five Elements Theory to say a lot of things about Lu Zhaolin's condition, the core of which was that the five elements were already reversed and terminally ill. In this case, Lu Zhaolin, who knew that he was hopeless, wrote darkly in the "Interpretation of diseases and yue ruo":
The eastern suburbs are absolutely this unicorn pen, and the western mountains are secretly this phoenix ke.
Dead and dead, dead and dead, dead and dead, dead and alive, dead and alive, and dead and dead.
With infinite nostalgia, with feelings about the fate of life, Lu Zhaolin and his family said goodbye, and finally threw himself into the water and died. As one of the founders of Tang poetry, his life ended in such a tragic way.